seven years, today

My father died seven years ago, today.

I wasn't there. I had been there, just a week before. DH and DS1, less than a year old, had flown with me up to MA. We stayed with my mom, and every day I drove up with her to the hospital in Milton to see Dad. DH stayed home with the baby; happily by that point he was only nursing once or twice a day (first thing in the morning, last thing before bed), so me being gone all day wasn't that big an issue.

Dad liked to have soup for lunch. Soup, and bread and butter. Mom made great vats of chicken soup or beef and vegetable soup, and then would freeze it in individual containers. Every day Dad would take out his soup and microwave it... even in the summer. It was what he liked.

In the hospital, dying of pulmonary fibrosis, Dad was on oxygen and barely eating anything. They kept trying to get him to drink that nasty-tasting Ensure, but it's so gloopy. It was hard for him. After my first day at the hospital with Mom, I asked if we could bring him some soup from home, could we heat it up at the kitchen in the nurses' station? Yes, yes -- they agreed right away.

So every day after that, we brought Dad soup, and he ate it all up. It meant a lot to him, that little piece of normalcy amongst all the beeping machines and tubes and coarse sheets and disruption. The man had no peace, there.

November 29, 1997, was my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. On that day, when we arrived at the hospital, Dad was out of bed, sitting in a chair. He had color in his face, and the most energy we had seen. A priest who was a friend of my oldest brother's, and also known to my parents, came in to give my Dad communion, and when he heard it was my parents' anniversary, he gave them both a special blessing. It really meant a lot to them.

Dad was so much improved that day that the doctors were amazed. If this keeps up, they said, he can go home. He'll need oxygen, but if he stabilizes like this, there will be no reason to keep him.

That day, we were hopeful. Soon after, DH and I flew home with DS1. Things were looking up, DH had to get back to work. None of us really knew what was going to happen.

Saturday morning, I was out shopping at the mall when my cellphone rang. It was my middle sister. Dad was asking for me, she said, but she told me that she didn't know if he would understand it was me, on the phone. I did the best I could. I told him I loved him, and that I was sorry I couldn't be there.

I don't remember exactly what I said. I don't remember what my sister told me, afterwards. I'd like to think she said he was calmer, somehow I believe that, but maybe that's wishful thinking. Neither me nor my sister could really talk much after that, so we hung up. Then it's just a blur, and eventually the call came that he was gone.

My Dad had the biggest, warmest hands in the whole world.
When he wasn't feeling well, he had all the restraint and logic of an irate teenager, which is to say, none. He could be downright mean sometimes, but afterwards was always repentent.
But that mean streak was only evident when he was feeling poorly (or drinking, which he gave up later in life) -- for of all the people I've ever known, my Dad had the greatest faith in the goodness of humanity.

At least that's what I like to think. I always think the best of people, whether they deserve it or not, sometimes, and that is something I learned from my Dad. There are so many things I learned from him, but the most succinct, profound lesson came when he was hospitalized following surgery to repair a 4-inch aneurysm; the doctors still couldn't figure out why the thing didn't burst and kill him. I was recently divorced, car-less, and living in Watertown; he was in the hospital in Milton and was stunned when I showed up to visit him. I impressed him with how skillfully I weilded my T-pass: it had taken 3 different buses and 2 different trains to get me to the hospital.

Although my divorced state was regrettable, he wasn't saddened by it. Rather, he was overjoyed at the return of his Prodigal Daughter. He once actually mailed me a copy of the story of the Prodigal Son. Recently DS1 has been studying for his First Confession, and when he read the story of the Prodigal Son as part of his reading material, I about lost it, remembering. So many years I had been away from my family, and now I was back. So it was wonderful to sit with Dad, then, and know that Death had been cheated, at least for a while. He told me:

Remember, nothing lasts forever. It will help you to appreciate the good times, and it will help you to endure the bad times, too, because you know they will end.

Somethings do last forever, though, or at least as forever as we can imagine in our mortal shells. Love is one of those things.

I will always love you, Dad.